How does Opnsense handle a mix of efficiency and performance cores. For example if PPoE uses a single core I would hate for this to end up on an efficiency core?
Just thinking about a new firewall platform. I'd like both 2.5Gb and 2*SFP+ AND a decent CPU without it turning into a space heater
I have a I7-8565U based unit at the moment. Way more CPU than I need atm - but only has 1Gb NIC's and my local ISP is threatening (at some point in the future) a 2.5Gb upgrade - which is very very shiny as a concept
I also have a AliExpress N100 unit with Intel 2.5Gb (226) NIC's which I tried out yesterday. I do run Suricata. The N100 unit, with an idle(ish) network connection and running suricata was running at 60+% CPU which doesn't bode well for a busy 1Gb, let alone a 2.5Gb connection running hot. All the CPU was suricata, if I disabled that the CPU dropped to not much
The answers lie in FreeBSD land mainly.
Lucky enough FreeBSD 13.3b1 is due out next week, and also 14 is available, so to get a better understanding of what's coming you may want to test drive both on N100 to have a better understanding of what's coming in OPNsense.
It's too early to know what's coming in 24.7, depending on how things work out could be either 13.3 or 14.1